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![]() ![]() Matter-antimatter annihilation is more scalable, but smashing those pugilistic particles together is dangerous. Maybe you could mine Jupiter for enough helium-3 to fuel nuclear fusion-after you’ve figured out fusion engines. To beat the clock, you need power-and lots of it. It’d be a multigenerational ship, and nobody dreams of going to space because it’s a nice place to die of old age. That’s almost 100 times faster than a bullet, but even at that velocity it would take some 19,000 years to reach Earth’s first stellar neighbor, Alpha Centauri. It’s dead now, but if sound traveled in space, you’d hear it screaming as it whips around the sun at speeds of more than 157,000 miles per hour. The fastest thing humans have ever built is a probe called Helios 2. “Whole new materials could be out there.” Before humanity books a one-way ticket to Kepler-438b, it’ll have to study up. “It’s been pummeled by asteroids for billions of years,” says Anita Gale, a space shuttle engineer. In the end, a destination’s resources will shape settlements, which makes surveying the drop zone critical. And NASA is looking into a process that can 3-D-print whole buildings-no need to import special equipment. If blasters and drillers are too heavy to ship, they’ll have to extract those riches with gentler techniques: melting, magnets, or metal-digesting microbes. Nearby asteroids are a great source of carbon and platinum ores-and water, once pioneers figure out how to mine the stuff. “Every planet has every chemical element in it,” says Ian Crawford, a planetary scientist at Birbeck, University of London, though concentrations differ. But settlers will have to harvest or make everything else. Seeds, oxygen generators, maybe a few machines for building infrastructure. When space caravans embark from Earth, they’ll leave full of supplies. You Can't Take a Mountain of Aluminum Ore With You It works at –263 degrees Celsius, which is balmy for superconductors, but it helps that space is already so damn cold. Scientists on the Space Radiation Superconducting Shield project are working on a magnesium diboride superconductor that would deflect charged particles away from a ship. NASA is testing plastics that can mitigate radiation in spaceships or space suits. They’re light and strong, and they’re full of hydrogen atoms, whose small nuclei don’t produce much secondary radiation. “You’re actually making the problem worse,” says Nasser Barghouty, a physicist at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center.Ī better solution? One word: plastics. When these particles knock into the atoms of aluminum that make up a spacecraft hull, their nuclei blow up, emitting yet more superfast particles called secondary radiation. Aside from cancer, it can also cause cataracts and possibly Alzheimer’s. This is space radiation, and it’s deadly. Outside the safe cocoon of Earth’s atmosphere and magnetic field, subatomic particles zip around at close to the speed of light. Essential to the future of space travel: world peace. If someone (like China?) starts blowing up enemy satellites, “it would be a disaster,” says Holger Krag, head of the Space Debris Office at the European Space Agency. That might be a century hence-or a lot sooner if space war breaks out. Put decommissioning programs in 90 percent of new launches or you’ll get the Kessler syndrome: One collision leads to more collisions until there’s so much crap up there, no one can fly at all. ![]() They’ll jettison extra fuel, then use rocket boosters or solar sails to angle down and burn up on reentry. So starting now, all satellites will have to fall out of orbit on their own. Pulling the sats out of orbit isn’t realistic-it would take a whole mission to capture just one. Mission control avoids dangerous paths, but tracking isn’t perfect. Some 4,000 orbit Earth, most dead in the air. Whipple shields-layers of metal and Kevlar-can protect against the bitsy pieces, but nothing can save you from a whole satellite. ![]()
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